#United States #Pennsylvania #Microsegmentation #Elisity #St. Luke's Health

Elisity's Revolutionary Microsegmentation Implementation at St. Luke's University Health Network

In a striking development highlighting the intersection of technology and healthcare, Elisity, a key player in identity-based microsegmentation, has successfully implemented its solution across St. Luke's University Health Network (SLUHN) in record time. This initiative has secured an impressive 85,000 medical devices while enhancing the network's capacity for clinical innovation.

The project was executed over a span of just 46 days, with no reported outages, zero changes required for IP addresses, and without the need for additional hardware. This speedy deployment is especially noteworthy for a major healthcare provider managing a sprawling network of 15 hospitals across Pennsylvania and New Jersey, serving a vast domain of 75 square miles.

Previously, SLUHN had struggled with conventional VLAN-based microsegmentation, which fell short of scaling effectively across the organization. The earlier strategies mandated complex processes such as changing IP addresses for each segmented device and coordinating across vendors for various types of medical equipment, proving inefficient for their scale. In contrast, Elisity’s approach has enabled SLUHN to enforce detailed security policies seamlessly within their existing Cisco infrastructure, requiring neither network re-architecture nor the integration of additional hardware.

The result was immediate and impactful: the organization's ransomware exposure shifted from a sweeping risk affecting all devices to a contained threat confined to a single switch. Consequently, SLUHN's security team felt secure enough to permit the use of robotic surgical systems, which facilitate remote participation in live medical procedures, a capability that had previously been restricted due to security concerns associated with their non-segmented network.

David Finkelstein, CISO at St. Luke's, remarked on the significance of this transition: "Our mission was to ensure that any potential ransomware incident would only affect a single device, thereby protecting the integrity of the entire organization. When our Senior Enterprise Information Security Architect, Dan Dopsovic, demonstrated the Elisity solution, we were astonished by its efficiency and results, allowing our operations to continue smoothly even under adverse conditions."

James Winebrenner, CEO of Elisity, affirmed the broader implications of St. Luke's deployment, stating, "Healthcare providers should not have to choose between facilitating clinical advancements and safeguarding their networks from lateral movement risks. St. Luke's achieved an enterprise-scale solution in just weeks, maintaining patient care without interruption, and successfully leveraged their secure environment to introduce advanced robotic surgical technology that had been previously deemed too risky."

Moreover, Elisity’s technology integrates with SLUHN’s existing security framework, including Palo Alto, CrowdStrike, Windows Defender, and others, to enrich device identities through the proprietary Elisity IdentityGraph™. This integration allows for the enforcement of dynamic, real-time security policies tailored to the specific needs of each device.

For more information on this transformative implementation, you can view the video that details how St. Luke's University Health Network successfully deployed identity-based microsegmentation across 85,000 medical devices in the unprecedented time frame of just 46 days.

About Elisity

Founded in 2019 and headquartered in San Jose, California, Elisity specializes in identity-based microsegmentation aimed at preventing lateral movement, halting the spread of ransomware, and ensuring compliance across IT, OT, and IoT environments. Their platform excels in discovering every device on the network and executing least-privilege access policies using the existing infrastructure, achieving full microsegmentation rapidly—often within weeks—without additional agents or hardware. With a robust client base that includes Fortune 500 healthcare systems and manufacturers, Elisity continues to redefine cybersecurity in healthcare and other sectors.